Monthly Archives: September 2010

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Interesting article I stumbled upon today, from a Jon Korbin on EzineMark.com. It deals with what I think is one of the most controversial issues for Apple in the future: the succession of Steve Jobs.

The 2-part article starts with a highly dithyrambic description of Steve’s role at Apple, one even your fellow webmaster would not dare write. Excerpt:

He has erected temples to Apple’s greatness in major cities around the world whose awesome presence evokes imagery of high priests and virgins surrounded by platinum chalices spilling over with grapes on the vine.

My attention was caught by the following two points in the article — they reflect my two main concerns about a Steve-less Apple. First, the control that only Steve can have a huge corporation like Apple.

His intimidating sense of control has afforded him the kind of command over this ever-growing audience that seldom belongs to individuals who don’t draw their power from Government or God.

The author is referring to Apple fanboys like us. But this is not the issue. The issue is about Apple itself. Continue reading →

I have nothing against Steve Jobs humor – I was an avid reader of Fake Steve when he was an active, satirist blogger. But I think we’ve crossed the line of pointlessness with Where’s Jobs, a website where people submit fake pictures on which they’ve added teeny-tiny pictures of Steve Jobs (à la Where’s Waldo). See for yourself.

MacRumors reported yesterday that Steve sent an email to one of their readers about the soon-to-begin shipment of the new Apple TV. The style is Steve-ish to say the least.

Full exchange below :

Any update on shipment of your hobby project? Looks like it will have to ship early next week for delivery before the end of this month.

Yep.

Sent from my iPhone

Amazing, isn’t it? 🙂
Seriously, I will report here any email Steve sends or is rumored to have sent. I was planning to open an “emails from steve” page on all about Steve Jobs.com but this blog is the perfect place for that. I can’t believe Emails from Steve Jobs thought of it before I did.

Forbes released yesterday their 2010 ranking of the 400 richest Americans. This year Steve Jobs is ranked the 42nd richest American (136th worldwide) with a net worth of $6.1 billion. The graph on the right shows that despite the worldwide crisis, Steve’s worth has kept growing over the recent years. Ironically, most of that wealth comes from Steve’s involvement with Pixar (now $4.4 billion in Disney stock). As far as political donations are concerned, do not trust the $26,700 figure given here. For years, Steve has given to the Democratic party using his wife’s name, as can be seen here.

In the tech world, nothing is really new under the sun. Steve’s good friend and future neighbor (in Woodside) Larry Ellison is now worth $27 billion, the 3rd richest American behind Warren Buffet and of course Uncle Bill (worth $54 billion). The Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin are each worth $15 billion, while Eric Schmidt is down to $5.5 billion. The talk of the town is more about Mark Zuckergerg, whose net worth is valued at $6.9 billion — hence more than Steve’s.

The dichotomy between the two CEOs points to an interesting fact: where as Jobs was fired from his company back in 1985, Zuckerberg has done a commendable job of keeping in power, still controlling an unprecedented 25 percent of the company and the majority of board seats. The young CEO probably learned a thing or two from Jobs’ mishap, and it seems to have paid off. He also had good counsel from Sean Parker, the founder of Napster and Plaxo, who had been booted out of his companies. Parker, who was Facebook’s first president until he was ousted, was determined to raise funding in a way that would preserve Zuckerberg’s control of Facebook, and that strategy has by and large panned out.

Dutch artist Metin Seven built a small, Lego-like bust of Steve Jobs so that you can have the iLeader always keep an eye on you. It was made using an advanced 3D-printing process (although it looks vintage with its pixel-like appearance and Steve’s dark hair) and will cost you $117.

The Telegraph posted an article today that sings the praises of Apple’s CEO. It is for a broad audience and therefore we, knowledgeable people, will learn nothing from it. However I am still posting about it to illustrate my point in the previous post regarding how common it is to praise Steve nowadays. I will try and find an article from 10-15 years ago to make the contrast more apparent.

For a change, there aren’t that many errors in the article, except for the description of Jony Ive, who is described as the designer behind Apple’s computer and iPod range” instead of the head designer behind every piece of hardware that has come out of Cupertino for the last 13 years.

The prestigious Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting article: Stop Comparing Yourself With Steve Jobs by Dan Pallotta. The main idea is that you should draw inspiration from the people you admire, but certainly not compare yourself with them. The reason the article uses Steve Jobs is explained in the first paragraph already:

Comparing yourself with Steve Jobs is not healthy. Never mind that it’s probably the pastime of every alpha male and female businessperson on the planet these days.

There are two reasons why the article caught my eye:

– one, some people who (sadly) don’t spend enough time on the website think that the section “Being Steve” refers to “how to emulate Steve Jobs”. Maybe the name is a bad choice — though I like it and don’t intend to change it, sorry folks. But if you spend a couple minutes on the website, you’ll see it’s a description of Steve’s personality, things that have to be dealt with on all about Steve Jobs but have nothing to do on the biography. So — no, it’s not a manual on how to “be like Steve”.

– second, and more importantly, during my current studies in business school, I do have often heard Steve Jobs quoted in many a class by my teachers as a great inspiration. This is quite ironic to me.Continue reading →

CNet reports that the San Mateo county DA is nearing the final stages of the case of the lost/stolen prototype iPhone 4 that ended up on Gizmodo in March. The name of the student who stole the prototype is given in the article: it’s Brian Hogan, old of 21. The DA told the press he had interviewed “a number of Apple employees and other people connected to the case, including Apple CEO Steve Jobs”.

Useful quote at the end of the article :

Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to be–but “appropriates such property to his own use”–is guilty of theft. In addition, a second state law says any person who knowingly receives property that has been obtained illegally can be imprisoned for up to one year.

Valleywag is reporting today a new delightful exchange of emails between Steve Jobs and a random person. This time we are dealing with a senior student in journalism from Long Island University (pictured here) who emailed Steve complaining she didn’t get answers from Apple’s PR department for her school work.

I’ll start by saying this exchange has to be handled with all usual precautions, because it’s happened before that supposedly “authentic” emails were in fact 100% fake. But let’s consider this one real.

The first comment I’ll make is on the obvious bias of Gawker Media toward Apple’s CEO, which is obvious if you have a look at the actual exchange (below) before reading Valleywag’s depiction of it. The post conveys the idea that the student is being insulted by a “stubborn” super-rich CEO who treats customers like shit. The feeling I got reading the emails is pretty different.